Posted on 09/07/2008 12:21:07 AM PDT by guitarplayer1953
Is prayer to saints / Mary Biblical?"
The issue of Catholics praying to saints is one that is full of confusion. It is the official position of the Roman Catholic Church that Catholics do not pray TO saints or Mary, but rather that Catholics can ask saints or Mary to pray FOR them. The official position of the Roman Catholic Church is that asking saints for their prayers is no different than asking someone here on earth to pray for you. However, the practice of many Catholics diverges from official Roman Catholic teaching. Many Catholics do in fact pray directly to saints and/or Mary, asking them for help – instead of asking the saints and/or Mary to intercede with God for help. Whatever the case, whether a saint or Mary is being prayed to, or asked to pray, neither practice has any Biblical basis.
The Bible nowhere instructs believers in Christ to pray to anyone other than God. The Bible nowhere encourages, or even mentions, believers asking individuals in Heaven for their prayers. Why, then, do many Catholic pray to Mary and/or the saints, or request their prayers? Catholics view Mary and saints as "intercessors" before God. They believe that a saint, who is glorified in Heaven, has more "direct access" to God than we do. Therefore, if a saint delivers a prayer to God, it is more effective than us praying to God directly. This concept is blatantly unbiblical. Hebrews 4:16 tells us that we, believers here on earth, can "...approach the throne of grace with confidence..."
1 Timothy 2:5 declares, "For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." There is no one else that can mediate with God for us. If Jesus is the ONLY mediator, that indicates Mary and saints cannot be mediators. They cannot mediate our prayer requests to God. Further, the Bible tells us that Jesus Christ Himself is interceding for us before the Father, "Therefore He is able to save completely those who come to God through Him, because He always lives to intercede for them" (Hebrews 7:25). With Jesus Himself interceding for us, why would we need Mary or the saints to intercede for us? Who would God listen to more closely than His Son? Romans 8:26-27 describes the Holy Spirit interceding for us. With the 2nd and 3rd members of the Trinity already interceding for us before the Father in Heaven, what possible need could there be to have Mary or the saints interceding for us?
Catholics argue that praying to Mary and the saints is no different than asking someone here on earth to pray for you. Let us examine that claim. (1) The Apostle Paul asks other Christians to pray for him in Ephesians 6:19. Many Scriptures describe believers praying for one another (2 Corinthians 1:11; Ephesians 1:16; Philippians 1:19; 2 Timothy 1:3). The Bible nowhere mentions anyone asking for someone in Heaven to pray for them. The Bible nowhere describes anyone in Heaven praying for anyone on earth. (2) The Bible gives absolutely no indication that Mary or the saints can hear our prayers. Mary and the saints are not omniscient. Even glorified in Heaven, they are still finite beings with limitations. How could they possibly hear the prayers of millions of people? Whenever the Bible mentions praying to or speaking with the dead, it is in the context of sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy, and divination - activities the Bible strongly condemns (Leviticus 20:27; Deuteronomy 18:10-13). The one instance when a "saint" is spoken to, Samuel in 1 Samuel 28:7-19, Samuel was not exactly happy to be disturbed. It is plainly clear that praying to Mary or the saints is completely different from asking someone here on earth to pray for you. One has a strong Biblical basis, the other has no Biblical basis whatsoever.
God does not answer prayers based on who is praying. God answers prayers based on whether they are asked according to His will (1 John 5:14-15). There is absolutely no basis or need to pray to anyone other than God alone. There is no basis for asking those who are in Heaven to pray for us. Only God can hear our prayers. Only God can answer our prayers. No one in Heaven has any greater access to God's throne that we do through prayer (Hebrews 4:16).
Like you did to me in post 114?
The inability to counter consistent and cohesive doctrine that is incompatible with Protestantism does not constitute "twisting of words" on anyone else's part.
A bunch of double talk? Back at you.
I submit that actually reading what the Bible on the whole has to say about issues of concern makes a lot more sense than occasionally referring to certain convenient passages when it comes to matters of faith.
And I submit if that were true Jesus would have written a book instead of training disciples.
God would have raised someone else had Mary not bore the saviour. His will would have been done through another innocent young woman.
We honor Christ and Him crucified. He is no longer on the cross. Mary herself would be shocked at how Catholics put her up on a pedestal. It’s almost as though she is revered above Christ by some Catholics, even some here. Mary is called blessed because she bore Christ. That’s all she did. She is not co-redeemer, Queen of Heaven, Queen of the Universe or anything else. Mary, mother of our Lord. Period.
This ends up going to the "different mindsets" notion I've been pushing on this thread. I'd suggest that the sola scriptura mindset wants a set of data which is entirely objective and unchanging and then proposes to use that dataset to work out the true dogma.
As a child of my age I understand the appeal.
Some Catholic apologists seem to propose Scripture plus the deposit of faith (as presented by the nebulous "magisterium") as providing the "Correct" dataset. Thus they fall into the same renaissance, budding Baconian empirical mindset in which the natural sciences are the model and paradigm of objective truth.
I think that model fails, whether applied by Protestants or, as modified, by Catholics. Practically speaking, it seems there is right much disagreement among the Sola Scriptura guys. Theoretically speaking if there were some place where the "deposit of faith" were collected and updated, and kind of annual journal of "where we are now" it could still be subject to the same disagreeing interpretations as the Scriptures themselves are.
Personally, I really am a kind of Xtian existentialist. One of the reasons I resonated so much with the late J2P2 Magnus is that His "personalism" stirred up sympathetic vibrations in what is generously called my "thought".
"That's nice," I hear you say, "but what does it mean?" I think it means something like what Augustine thought, "Unless you believe, you will not understand" as he read what Isaiah said to Hezekiah (Is 7:9 - from memory) "If you do not believe, you will certainly not be established."
To put that positively, God calls us into relationship with Him, and without the answering commitment of our hearts (which He enables and prompts) we cannot be "established" or, for that matter, "understand".
This belief is one which at least potentially requires our risking everything we have, even our lives. Experientially, and because God is gentle, it seems to me He rarely requires such a risk, and only slowly imparts the conscious readiness to take such a risk. But the rock-bottom requirement of faith is inescapable.
This is, somehow, because, ultimately, the Truth is not a body of propositions but a personal or super-personal being. The Truth is Jesus the Messiah, the Lord, and all that is true in whatever way is true in Him.
Now, and again this is, IMHO, God's gentleness and grace, we get to, as it were, "practice" or "train" in plighting our troth to the Truth.
We plight our troth not so much to ecclesiastical bureaucrats or even committees of such bureaucrats (something FAR more dreadful) but to what we take to be God's promise to His Church.
It is as if God were to say, "Okay, you say you trust me? Well I'm telling you now to follow the teaching of these bureaucrats. Trust my promise to you that even their venality (or worse) cannot obstruct the keeping of my promise."
It is hard enough to stick with my own conclusions when things get rough. A little peer pressure, some mockery, some threats, and suddenly sticking to my guns seems sort of arbitrary and self-centered.
But submitting myself to some manifestly imperfect bureaucrat on what I take to be God's say so alone? Now, that is hard!
In this connection, it is maybe important to point out that not all the "Doctors" of the Church are theologians. Terese of Avila and Catherine of Sienna were clearly people in intense and vital relationships with (arising from intense and vital commitments to) God in Christ.
Catherine says, "All the way to heaven is heaven." That is not a proposition of systematic theology. It is either a report of someone who knows "all the way to heaven" or it is nonsense. But Catherine was a lady who was at once obedient and not afraid to upbraid priests and the Pope. But she was obedient.
You may say, "But what if they had said or required something wrong?" And we answer, "The promise of God, which He gracefully kept was that He would not let them go wrong when it REALLY counted." The miracle is that they did not say or require something wrong, when it counted.
We look, with you and with your horror and suspicion, at these ecclesiastical bureaucrats. And we give a low whistle and shake our heads and say,"Wow, that was CLOSE! But God kept His promise."
But for the individual lay Catholic, especially for one with an interest in theology, it all comes down to the commitment to Christ and the willingness to follow Him, even when it looks ridiculous to do so.
If the Summa, if the Catechism, if the Bible were all we knew, we would know nothing worth knowing. We seek to know Christ, and knowing Him only a little, with such a small portion of knowledge as He has chosen to give us, we place ourselves in His care, even when that turns out to be the care of bureaucrats.
As the song says:
Oh Lord, in you have I trusted.
let me never be confounded.
Don’t worry, someone will spin it around for us so it doesn’t mean what we think it says. LOL.
You are seeking a proclaimation by the Church? This would be difficult to do because most Illness and Calamity and Vocational Patron Saints weren't established by official decree, but by tradition. In tradition, they serve the same purpose as the pagan gods they replaced; the protect a particular group, or prevent a particular kind of illness. There is a patron saint of weavers and a goddess of weaving, patron saint of vintners and a god that protects vintners, saints for fishermen, gods for fishermen etc.
Gabriel Possenti who is already canonized for some other reason, did some very nice shooting when he was a seminarian. I have no problem calling on him when I go to the range to drill, and I'm all over getting him declared the patron of handgunners.
It seems that in the black and white world of some Protestants, the fact that bad men enjoyed cakes and ale requires good men to forgo them altogether. I bet there was once a pagan who loved his wife. Shall we therefore abandon matrimony?
Why does Paul ask for the prayers of the Ephesians if there is only one mediator?
Amen.
Let me interpret that for you. Asking the dead to...,is crazy.
Believing anything different than my opinion or feeling is crazy.
Just from reading their past posts, the Incarnation means little to these people and they like to gloss over the Crucifixion and glorify the Resurection.
Their faith is only based on their own opinion of what the Bible says, although they all say they are guided by the Holy Spirit, who evidently tells different people different things so everyone can be confused, I guess.
They seem to think that being “saved” is the end of the journey and not the beginning. They think that being “saved” is the only goal. They think that serving God, willingly, consciously is believing that you are “working out your salvation” and so we must not believe that we are saved solely by the Grace of God.
Some of them even believe that God created some to be damned and some to be elect and that you have no choice in the matter. Nope, no free will, the tyant God will force you to go to heaven whether you want to or not, whether you sin badly or not and send you to hell no matter how badly you would like to go.
“Minor little thing - um, by Catholic Tradition (this has been taught for 19 and a half centuries), Mary didn't die. She was "assumed" into Heaven. When it was her time, she went straight there, body and soul.”Oh really?
you say i twist words ?
your following statement is an ad hominem attack that doesn’t deal with the issues i brought to the table in a previous post:
“Then why do you need to go “ad hominem” instead of actually addressing the issues I’ve brought to the table?”
my reply about catholic authority was sharp & pithy, you just can’t handle the Truth.
you say catholic authority is not limited by protestant doctrine. which means for most protestants the Authority of the Word of GOD is abrogated & superseded by fiat of catholic hierarchy.
sort of like an unconstitutional executive order.
earlier i said nowhere in Scripture is it advocated to pray to anyone other than to GOD.
your response:
“Where is it prohibited ?
Where do you get the authority to make positive prohibitions out of Scriptural silence?”
so to you Scriptural silence means no authority & thus no prohibition.
then i said Scripture is silent in prohibiting pedophilia, [thinking how will he continue to support Scriptural silence as reason to not condemn anything ?]
your response was: “Protestant doctrinal limitations do not apply to Catholic authority, but that is the nature of circular reasoning.
The Catholic Church has the authority to prohibit such things in and of itself. There is no need to appeal to Scripture for Church pronouncements. ... “
based on your reasoning, a lack of specific wording in Scripture leaves protestants without authority against perceived idolatry. yet you invent it out of thin air to condemn what we both agree is evil & also to invent doctrine that Scripture is completely silent on ie assumption of mary.
what’s good for thee is not for me. no private non papal interpretation allowed. well, you can’t have it both ways without contradicting yourself.
& about circular reasoning, let’s abrogate that. reasoning based on Truth is radial.
GOD is the center & source of all Truth. His Word is Truth. [John 17:17] this nullifies human
authority except where it is actually delegated by GOD.
James 1:
17 Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights,
with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.
as i see it catholic hierarchy derives their authority
from the pope which is derived from catholic interpretation of “upon this Rock I will build My Church”.
Which in turn is Scripture & thus is a form of sola scriptura. i’ve brought this up because i know most catholics don’t believe it. nevertheless,
without that passage in Scripture, there would be no basis for a pope, even though i believe catholic
doctrine on this passage to be false.
finally, about this: “no need to appeal to Scripture for Church pronouncements”
false doctrine declared by catholic authority, imposed on the disagreeing, enforced by violence. this is the inquisition. .
so you’ll understand when few protestants have any respect or trust for so called catholic authority, its uniquely unBiblical doctrines & its label of heretic against those who disagree.
What the church teaches about this, yes is Tradition, which is one of the three equal pillars on which the Church stands - Magisterium or the teaching arm, Scripture of which books are included was decided at the Council of Carthage in 400 something A.D. (with Sts. Augustine and Jerome getting into one nasty argument that was settled by the bishop of Rome at the time), and Tradition with a capital T - that which has always been taught and is not in scripture. Just because a given teaching is not in scripture doesn't make it false. There are a lot of things that are taught that are Tradition which have been documented by the church doctors from the very beginning. Not that a lack of evidence can prove something to be true, but there is also the matter that no grave has ever been said to exist for the Blessed Mother. It was always said that St. Peter was buried beneath the altar of St. Peters, but that was not excavated until the 1940's - and yes, there he is.
I know this isn't going to convince people, but this is what is. Not everything that was given to us by the Father through the Son is in scripture. Scripture even says that.
Actually, the 10% of the brain thing is a cultural myth.
We use a much larger percentage—in the 90%’s IIRC . . . Greater imaging technologies have confirmed it repeatedly.
That 10% came from a spurious broadside guess/illustration by a famous person—I forget who. It never was based on any research even initially.
Silly conjectures based on NONsense are poor foundations for even fantasized RELIGIOUS guesses.
Well put.
Though it’s wise to avoid the use of “you” on the religion forum. And, that “you” certainly didn’t apply to Dr. E!
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